


marie

by romanticalgirl



Series: December Ficlets 2007 [22]
Category: Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Originally posted 11-28-07</p>
    </blockquote>





	marie

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 11-28-07

The house seems cold and empty now that they have left, though the fires still burn as hot as they had before, though there are still the servants and the Count himself. There is something missing in the air, however, a certain vital element that made her feel alive.

She stands at the water’s edge and watches it flow past her, moving on to a bigger life than the relatively small passageway next to the fences and fields of her home, and wonders about the air. It is as crisp as always, ripe with spring and the promise of life to come, but it lacks something she cannot name. She wants to say that it is the scent of them – man and sweat and pent up frustration, of duty and honor that they smell of as strongly as a day’s work – but even that seems incorrect, not complete.

Perhaps it is the security they offered, though they themselves were danger. Or perhaps it is the sense of danger that lingered on their skin. She remembers the taste of it on Hornblower, like a snapping fire and burnt coffee, bitter and hot and ready to set her alight at any moment, and on Bush, salty and stormy, tossing her roughly until every inch of her felt battered and spent.

It is not that, she knows, for she can still taste those things on her tongue when she closes her eyes, feel them with her fingers as she remembers them on her body like a blind man reading one’s face, feeling contours and valleys, scars and skin. Perhaps it is the combination of all, or perhaps it is the silence that seems to fall where, for a while, there was no silence. The easy camaraderie that she and the Count have is missing the simple muttered phrases of French Bush managed to master, the discordant flow of Brown’s quick fluency with his strange hint of his accent and Hornblower’s polished words, flowing easy. 

Her home is not hers anymore. Perhaps it is as the Count has felt while she has lived with him, moving amongst the shadows of ghosts of his children, gone now. Now she has her own ghosts, though they are living ones, and the house is crowded with their ephemeral touch, making everything not quite as it seems and never quite what it was.


End file.
